Small Space, Long Legacy: Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer Revisits the Birth of Microcinema

March 4, 2026

Film still from otal Mobile Home and The Birth of Microcinema

Editor’s Note: As part of the 64th Ann Arbor Film Festival’s Special Programs, Total Mobile Home and The Birth of Microcinema revisits the radical exhibition experiment launched in 1990s San Francisco by Rebecca Barten and David Sherman. Originally written for the 64th AAFF program book, Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer’s essay reflects on the legacy of Total Mobile Home microCINEMA—and why its intimate, community-driven model continues to resonate with festivals like AAFF today.

Small Space, Long Legacy

by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer

Filmmakers Rebecca Barten and David Sherman coined the term microcinema in 1994 when they started illegally operating a tiny single-screen movie theater out of their rented apartment’s basement in San Francisco. Calling it Total Mobile Home microCINEMA, their basement became the go-to destination for Bay Area cinephiles for the next four years, with an eclectic program of work by local artists like George Kuchar and Nathaniel Dorsky as well as travelling filmmakers like Harun Farocki. Due to the small space, only a limited number of attendees could fit into the makeshift venue for any screening, making each event an intimate and unrepeatable experience. Thirty-two years later, Total Mobile Home microCINEMA remains lodged in the American cinephile imagination as an early example of a DIY theater fueled by passion and personality—an endeavor whose success points to an alternative model for moviegoing and community building. 

The Ann Arbor Film Festival commemorates this innovative venue by examining its legacy. With films from Bay Area legends such as Scott Stark and George Kuchar, plus artists like Emily Richardson and Lynne Sachs, this program showcases the breadth of Barten and Sherman’s cinema. 

Well-versed in the history of avant-garde cinema, Barten and Sherman assembled adventurous, thematic screenings that mixed and matched cinema and live performance. Evenings included such programs as Total Skeletons in the Closet, a presentation of “despised, neglected, failed, overlooked, embarrassing, minor, weak, flawed, or immature works by famous filmmakers”; Splice of Life: music, words, and early silent film; and Camera Rolls + Sushi Rolls: Film + Fish Invitational. These programs filled the microcinema’s calendar alongside select screenings of works by John Cassavettes, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Margarette von Trotta, among many other cinematic titans. Total Mobile Home microCINEMA presented a wide variety of works—equal parts cheeky and educational, and always illuminating. 

In retrospect, its inspired, intimate programming, like that of the Ann Arbor Film Festival and other proponents of the cinematic counterculture, stands in stark contrast to the soulless slop that shores up on streaming platforms nowadays, not to mention the big-budget nonsense that occupies multiplexes week after week. Nowadays, the value of connection—produced through innovative curation and communal viewing habits—has been replaced in the mainstream with a form of indifferent viewership—the product of compulsive, isolated screen-time powered with algorithms, sustained on alienation. What Total Mobile Home microCINEMA promised, and what makes it fit right in at AAFF, are the pleasures and challenges of experiencing experimental cinema in communion with others. 

When I spoke to Barten and Sherman about Total Mobile Home microCinema in 2024, they mentioned how strange it was that no one could accurately remember the layout of the space. Barten recalled that some attendees now claimed the space had 50 seats (it was far less!), and that others couldn’t quite place where the projector used to sit (it was in the utility room). Farocki said it resembled a bunker. Dorsky referred to it as a chapel. I’m positive others saw it as a conversation pit. Or a simple point of encounter. Perhaps some actually considered it a basement. Or a theater. Or soil with a row of benches. It’s not just that the passing of time has rendered the space amorphous—Total Mobile Home microCINEMA had always been more than a space. In its new and strange approach, it promised a different version of cinema for all in attendance—a community center whose definition must have been debated in conversation before or after each screening, whose essence manifested when the lights went down and the light of the projector seized that hallowed, hollow cavern. 

Whether presenting a flicker film or manic performance, Total Mobile Home microCinema had an intimacy that enveloped its attendees’ entire attention. Attending a program at Total Mobile Home microCINEMA one could fall out of this world and into cinema. For four years, Barten and Sherman offered a portal into a different culture, an alternative cinema, and, most importantly, a zone for connection. At a moment when so-called reality has become diffuse and balkanized, and when art can feel so distant and impersonal, Barten and Sherman’s experiment reminds us that so long as we can lend our eyes, ears, and brains in service of one thing larger than ourselves, hope for a society capable of building solidarity through art remains.  

Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer is a Mexican-American film critic, editor, and film programmer based in Brooklyn. He is the managing director of Le Cinéma Club and the managing editor at Screen Slate.

Small Space, Shared Spirit

While Total Mobile Home microCINEMA operated out of a San Francisco basement, its ethos—risk-taking programming, artist-centered curation, and communal viewing—mirrors the spirit that has sustained the Ann Arbor Film Festival for over six decades.

From intimate screenings in the Michigan Theater’s Screening Room to packed opening nights in the historic Main Auditorium, AAFF continues to champion experimental film not as content, but as encounter: a shared experience that comes alive in the presence of others.

Total Mobile Home and The Birth of Microcinema is one of nine Special Programs at the 64th AAFF, each offering a distinct perspective on cinema’s past, present, and possible futures.

Explore the full lineup of Special Programs here → Nine Special Programs to Watch at the 64th AAFF

And join us March 24–29, 2026.

64 AAFF Schedule and Tickets